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survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 18 percent, or nearly one in five Americans, say President Obama is a Muslim, up from 11 percent in March 2009.
Truth: Obama is a Christian who prays daily,
according to White House officials. Pastor Kibyjon Caldwell of Houston, who knows the president, told the AP that people misperceive the president’s religion because of “a 24-hour noise box committed to presenting the president in a false light.”
Many believe that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was a former Wall Street insider at Goldman Sachs. Even New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg once
publicly said Geithner had “worked at Goldman.”
Truth: Geithner worked in finance, but not on Wall Street or at Goldman Sachs. The 49-year-old started as a lower-level civil servant, then worked at the International Monetary Fund, and eventually became president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2003. The mislabeling began,
according to his advisers, when Washington Post columnist Al Kamen referred to Geithner as “a Goldman Sachs alum.”
Many believe
Desperate Housewives star Teri Hatcher had extensive plastic surgery on her forehead, eyes, nose, and cheeks.
Truth: To prove she did not have plastic surgery, Hatcher posted a
Facebook album of photos, all of which feature herself without makeup. “Just me wanting to teach that all those glam versus trash pictures of celebs are about LIGHTING,” she wrote in the album. “It’s not makeup it’s not suregery [sic] or botox its LIGHT.”
Sherrod’s full 43-minute speech, which ultimately conveyed a different meaning. The incident Sherrod was speaking about occurred in 1986, when she was working for a nonprofit—not the USDA—and in the full speech, she talks about how the experience taught her that the situation is not about white versus black, but about the “haves and have-nots.” Eloise Spooner, the wife of the farmer in the story, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that Sherrod “kept us out of bankruptcy” and was “ a friend for life” . After firing her, the White House issued an apology to Sherrod, with Obama’s chief spokesman, Robert Gibbs, saying “a disservice” was done to the ousted USDA representative, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack extending his “personal and profound apologies” for what he considers a move made in haste.
Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP Photo
The planned Park51 Islamic community center and mosque is commonly referred to in the media as the “ground zero mosque,” leading many to believe the center will be situated at the World Trade Center site, where the September 11 attacks took place. Meanwhile, others believe the project’s funding is massive, coming from as far as
Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Truth: Park51 is two blocks away from ground zero, on the north side of Park Place, about halfway between Church Street and West Broadway in Lower Manhattan. And so far, as The Daily Beast’s
Asra Q. Nomani points out, the project has a PayPal account with less than $9,000 of funds in it—without a peep, or dollar, from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a.k.a. the “Lockerbie Bomber,” was released from prison on Aug. 20, 2009, on compassionate grounds because he was
reported to be dying of metastatic prostate cancer and had just months to live.
Truth: Professor Karol Sikora—who diagnosed the former Libyan intelligence officer, convicted of murdering 270 people when a bomb he planted on Pan-Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988—now
says Megrahi “could survive for 10 years or more.”
Legend has it the world’s foremost search engine began its life in a garage.
Truth: While Google did incorporate itself as a company in
Susan Wojcicki’s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park, on Sept. 4, 1998, what would eventually become the world’s premier search engine started a few years earlier. Google really began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page. Then a student at Stanford, Page was working on the Stanford Digital Library Project, attempting to create a universal digital library. Page, with some sage-like advice from his supervisor Terry Winograd, eventually focused on the problem of backlinking—finding out which web pages linked to a page—and nicknamed the project “BackRub.” He was soon joined by fellow Stanford Ph.D. student Sergey Brin,
and the rest is history.
More than 8 million Toyotas and Lexuses were recalled between October 2009 and January 2010 because of electronic throttle problems that were said to lead certain pedals to stick. As many as
89 crash deaths since 2000 were linked to the pedal problems.
Truth: While many of Toyota’s pedals did stick,
a study found that about 2,000 cases of unintended acceleration were the result of drivers. Toyota contends that “pedal misapplication” was the reason for a majority of the cases. What happens next in determining whether Toyota or American drivers were most to blame remains to be seen.
According to the
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, nearly half of Americans believe President Obama started the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a U.S. government program that purchases assets and equity from financial institutions.
Truth: President George W. Bush enacted TARP. Only 34 percent of Americans believe this, according to the Pew poll.
Yankee great Lou Gehrig passed away on June 2, 1941, at the age of 37, reportedly from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease that impairs motor function, causing the muscles to atrophy. Since Gehrig was the first famous figure to be diagnosed with the disease, it came to be known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
Truth: There’s a good chance Gehrig didn’t die of Lou Gehrig’s disease, according to a study published by a group of Boston researchers in the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology.
The study highlights three ALS-diagnosed cases that were very similar to Gehrig’s where the patients actually suffered from a similar form of neurotrauma caused by the long-term effects of brain damage, brought on by
concussions. Though Gehrig is never mentioned in the study, it does raise doubts about his death. Gehrig was cremated after his death, so we’ll never know for sure.
Some say the Iraq war ended when the last American combat troops left the country in mid-August; while others say it finished in May 2003, when President George W. Bush
declared : “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
Truth: Some 50,000 U.S. troops remain in the country and will be there until the end of 2011, advising and training Iraqi forces while protecting American interests. “We are ending the war... but we are not ending our work in Iraq,” P.J. Crowley, a spokesman for the State Department,
told MSNBC. Whether it’s defined as “work” or “war,” the definition of “end” continues to be a little hazy.
DDT, an insecticide used to combat malaria, was branded hazardous to the environment by American biologist Rachel Carson in her 1962 book,
Silent Spring. The book suggested DDT caused cancer in humans and was a major threat to wildlife, particularly birds. DDT was outlawed in the U.S. in 1972.
Truth: Used as an insecticide to treat malaria since World War II, DDT is only harmful when used indiscriminately, as it was in the 1950s, when it was even included in a
popular mixed drink, and it is capable of doing far more good than bad. “If it’s a chemical, it must be bad," said Dr. Amir Attaran, a Harvard University researcher. “If it’s DDT, it must be awful. And that’s fine if you’re a rich white environmentalist. It’s not so fine if you’re a poor black kid who is about to lose his life
from malaria.” However, use of DDT in Sri Lanka “cut malaria rates here from 3 million cases a year in the 1940s to fewer than 50 in 1963,” writes Roger Bate in
The Daily Telegraph. Since these days malaria infects between 250 million and 500 million people every year, and kills close to 1 million, it would be wise to
embrace DDT.
A CNN/Opinion
Research poll released in early August, shows that 41 percent of Republicans believe Obama was born in another country.
Truth: Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
According to
early reports , Robert Krentz, a rancher along the Arizona-Mexico border, was brutally murdered, along with his dog, by an illegal immigrant on March 27.
Truth: Although several conservative news outlets used the illegal-immigrant claim to bolster their reform initiatives, the
Arizona Daily Star reported the suspect was American before authorities finally came to the realization that they had no idea who the suspect was, only that he or she was based in the U.S. The Daily Beast’s Terry Greene Sterling breaks down the entire
Robert Krentz saga here.
